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LXer Weekly Roundup for 16-Oct-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

The VirtualBox Kernel Driver Is Tainted Crap: Linux kernel developers have marked Oracle's VirtualBox Linux kernel driver as "tainted crap" due to the overwhelming number of problems this module has caused. When the "vboxdrv" driver for the Linux kernel is loaded, after a patch by Red Hat's Dave Jones, it will mark the kernel as tainted crap. Even though this VirtualBox driver is open-source (it's under the GPL), the quality of the driver is quite poor and continues to cause issues for many users. In particular, kernel developers have become frustrated that this virtualization driver is causing random memory corruption. Specifically cited is "corrupt linked lists, corrupt page tables, and just plain 'weird' crashes."

Photoshop Alternatives for Linux: Photoshop is without doubt the most well known piece of photo editing software. It is used by serious hobby photographers and professionals alike. However, although you can run Photoshop on a Linux machine by using a virtual box containing a Windows operating system, there are some good alternatives available on Linux.

Relishing the release name: Quick (and no Googling): What are the release names for Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 7.10? Chances are you couldn't name Constantine and Gutsy Gibbon off the top of your head because those release names, and probably every other one that distros come up with, weren't seared into your subconscious. The moral of this story, according to Larry the Free Software Guy, is that release names, though sometimes fun, are forgotten quickly.

Changing Desktop Appearance On Linux Mint 11 (Advanced): This tutorial is supposed to show you how to change the GNOME desktop appearance on Linux Mint 11 further than the standard options of the Appearance section in the Control Center allow. I am going to use several different applications for this cause. This is the standard desktop that comes with Mint, so if you have not changed anything about that all steps should work fine for you. Be aware that the use of the nVidia proprietary drivers may not be unrisky!

Small Victories? I'll Take 'Em...: One thing I notice over and over when showing people Linux...they cannot wrap their heads around the whole "No antivirus needed" thing. I take the time to pull up various articles encouraging computer users NOT to use Windows to do their banking. That usually does it. She told me that even if she could not run her apps in Linux, she would like Linux installed as a dual boot so she could bank with confidence on the Internet. Done deal. That should be the end of the story but it isn't.

Hadoop: A Linux even Microsoft likes: There was a time when Microsoft despised open source, because open source essentially meant "Linux," and Linux was a serious threat to Microsoft's operating system business. While that threat remains, open source has become such a big tent that Microsoft increasingly feels at home with a broad array of open-source projects. Nowhere is this truer than in its announced support for Hadoop, the open-source software framework that dominates the Big Data movement.